There's nothing that compares to making a silk purse out of a sow's ear.
"I took the road less traveled by, and that has made all the difference". Robert Frost
Indeed.
I used to race RC boats. When everyone else was racing 7.5-11cc engines on Nitro, I ran 30cc Homelite engines on gasoline. I would machine cooling fins off the cylinder and replace them with a push on water jacket, remove the key on the magneto so I could advance the timing, deck the bottom end of the cylinder to increase compression, hog out the transfer ports, re-time the intake and exhaust ports, stuff the crankcase, polish the piston skirt, knife edge the rod, add a tuned pipe, etc... All inexpensive efforts done by trial and error, but I ended up making a 1hp@8000rpm engine push 4hp@14000rpm. Lots of satisfaction in learning what works and what doesn't.